Finn Lau has a bounty on his head. He can’t walk the streets of London, now his home city, without looking over his shoulder. He carries a personal alarm and a strobe torch wherever he goes. He’s done so since July 2023, when Hong Kong authorities offered a HK$1m (approx. US$ 128,000) reward for his arrest, along with that of seven other Hong Kong nationals living in the UK and other western states.

Their crime? Calling for democracy. In 2019, triggered by the introduction of a law to allow extraditions to mainland China, the eight Hongkongers with a price on their heads helped organise the biggest democracy protests in their country’s history, eventually subdued with fierce repression.

Having silenced dissent internally, authorities keep pursuing dissidents in exile, fearful of any embers that could reignite rebellion. They’re right about one thing: exiled activists leave to save their lives and liberty, but also to continue their struggles for democracy and human rights. Repression follows them.

Lau has good reason to fear being abducted and taken to China, or killed by Chinese agents in the UK. He stands accused of having committed national security offences, including foreign collusion and incitement to secession. Hong Kong chief executive John Lee warned that he and the other seven would be ‘pursued for life’. Receiving threats and reading about plots to abduct and kill him are now part of Lau’s routine. He’s already been violently attacked on the street.

He’s one of many, because China is far from the only state using transnational tactics to crush dissent.

Closing civic space and diaspora activism

Close to three quarters of humanity currently live under authoritarian regimes. Defending democracy and human rights is becoming harder as civic space is shutting down. The proportion of people living in countries with closed civic space, 30.6 per cent, is the highest in years.

In country after country, civil society activists, journalists and political dissidents are often forced to leave if they want to continue their work. For many, exile is the only choice. Civil society activists and organisations promoting rights in countries with authoritarian regimes and closed civic space, such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burundi, Egypt and Iran, work largely in exile.

From exile, activists are better able to support those who remain, mostly underground, documenting human rights violations. They help activists at home challenge surveillance and communicate safely. They advocate for them with foreign governments and amplify their voices in international forums. They support others in need of resettlement. They continue to stage protests abroad.

They often face enormous difficulties in working with people back home. In some cases, like Eritrea, this is because the internet is highly restricted. In others, as in Hong Kong, those in contact with exiled activists will likely be arrested if discovered.

China’s transnational repression

Transnational repression isn’t new, but it’s becoming increasingly common. The Chinese state uses it mainly against what it calls ‘the five poisons’: Chinese dissidents – under which it includes Hong Kong protesters, Falun Gong practitioners, Taiwanese people, Tibetans and Uyghurs. A recent report from the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, focusing on China’s transnational repression of Tibetan diaspora communities, offers abundant testimony of repression that crosses borders, with cases across Europe and in Australia, Canada, India, Nepal and the USA. These aren’t isolated incidents – there’s pretty much no Tibetan refugee with family members back home who hasn’t experienced transnational repression.

China has stepped up its transnational repression as it’s closed down civic space in Hong Kong, ending the ‘one country, two systems’ pledge that once meant Hongkongers could access some of the vital civic freedoms long suppressed in mainland China. In the prolonged crackdown that followed the 2019 democracy protests, the authorities arrested hundreds under the National Security Law, denying most of them bail. Several democracy activists were subjected to multiple trials and handed long sentences. The only way others avoided this fate was through exile.

But Hong Kong’s police then issued international arrest warrants against several high-profile exiled activists, including Finn Lau. Targeted exiles were in Australia, the UK and the USA, all countries that suspended their extradition agreements with Hong Kong in the wake of the National Security Law, meaning that China couldn’t use channels it traditionally abuses, such as Interpol’s red notice system, to get its hands on them.

In 2022 it was revealed that China maintained a network of over 100 secret ‘police stations’ in 53 countries – including the countries where Hong Kong’s targeted activists live – that are used to intimidate exiles and in some cases capture and return them to China. In April 2023, US authorities charged over 40 Chinese operatives with transnational repression against US-based Chinese nationals, including for operating a secret police station in New York.

China is also using its economic influence in Southeast Asia to pressure authorities to arrest and deport activists, dissidents, human rights lawyers and journalists to China. A recent target was Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei, arrested in Laos on his way to Thailand, where he planned to take a flight to the USA to reunite with his wife and daughter.

Where it lacks such influence, as in the USA, the Chinese state still has means to intimidate its citizens, as seen in a recent case of a Chinese international student in Washington DC who was harassed by China’s state security police for his activism while his family members in China were hauled in for police questioning and released with a warning. Chinese students abroad are also pressured to self-censor for fear of being reported by fellow Chinese students, whom Chinese Students and Scholars Associations encourage to keep an eye on each other.

Repressive copycats

China is far from the only transnational repressor. According to a Freedom House report analysing eight years of data from 2014 to 2022, the top five perpetrators are China, Turkey, Tajikistan, Egypt and Russia, followed by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Belarus and Rwanda. These 10 account for 80 per cent of recorded cases.

Exiled Iranian activists in multiple European countries have experienced hacking, cyber-attacks and online harassment, death threats, surveillance and intimidation, seemingly by Iranian security agents. Two activists in different countries reported having their car tyres slashed, and several described being followed home from meetings by suspicious men.

During the wave of protests that erupted in Iran in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police in September 2022, Iranian students protesting in the UK were repeatedly harassed, intimidated and threatened, as were their relatives back home. In late 2023, a UK news outlet uncovered a plot by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to assassinate two Iranian journalists, Fardad Farahzad and Sima Sabet, working for an Iranian TV network in London.

In August 2023, Algerian journalist and opposition activist Abdou Semmar survived an assassination attempt in Paris, where he’s lived in exile since 2019.

In 2021, Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko went as far as ordering the hijacking of a plane to force an exiled blogger back to Belarus. Recently Belarus authorities found a new weapon to use against exiles, barring them from renewing their passports and other essential documents outside Belarus. The aim is to try to force them home, where they would face certain detention. Myanmar’s junta has started voiding the passports of nationals living in Singapore, making it impossible for them to travel internationally.

Some aren’t shying away from murder. This includes Rwanda, a small country with an international spy agency of a size and sophistication more commonly associated with superpowers, notorious for going after exiled critics of authoritarian President Paul Kagame. Rwanda is also becoming an increasingly hostile place for those fleeing repression in neighbouring Burundi.

Thailand, home to thousands of exiled Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Laotian and Vietnamese activists, is no longer a safe haven. Its authorities are increasingly collaborating with their counterparts in the region or allowing their intelligence agencies to operate on Thai soil.

Bounsuan Kitiyano, a member of Thailand-based Free Lao, a network of Laotian migrant workers and human rights activists, was found dead in a border town in Thailand in May 2023. He’d participated in human rights meetings and peaceful protests at the Laos Embassy in Bangkok. Duong Van Thai, a prominent Vietnamese blogger and YouTuber seeking asylum, was abducted by Vietnamese intelligence agents in Thailand and forcibly returned home in April. Cambodian activist Thol Samnang of the banned Candlelight Party was arrested by Thai authorities as he arrived in the country seeking asylum in July. In December, Thai police also arrested Vietnamese human rights activist Lù A Da, two weeks after he publicly denounced the Vietnamese government’s systematic repression of Indigenous H’mong people.

Freelance Pakistani journalist Syed Fawad Ali Shah also had his exile cut short. In March he was found to have been jailed in Pakistan several months after going missing in Malaysia, where he’d lived for 13 years. He reported being abducted by Malaysian immigration officials in a joint operation with the Pakistani intelligence services and deported before spending six months in clandestine detention. He was eventually handed over to the Federal Investigation Agency’s cybercrime wing, which slapped him with several bogus charges before granting him temporary bail, keeping him constantly afraid of being returned to jail anytime.

Tactics

States use a wide range of tactics of transnational repression. Repressive regimes obstruct communications between exiles and their relatives and contacts back home to try to sever their connections. They spy on them, hack their devices, intercept their communications and collect personal information that they use for purposes of infiltration, disinformation or blackmail. They infiltrate diaspora communities, spread disinformation, sabotage their events, sow distrust and weaken solidarity.

States try to force activists to renounce their activism by intimidating and threatening them or their relatives. They seek to undermine their livelihoods, including by impeding money transfers from relatives. They put them under surveillance and have them followed. They force them to live in fear, taking a toll on their mental health. And sometimes they make good on their threats by physically attacking exiles or kidnapping them and forcing them back home, where detention or worse awaits them. At worst, they simply have them killed.

Transnational repressors often seek the collaboration of host governments to curtail their exiles’ civic freedoms, and to deny them legal residence and expel them. Sometimes they use legal means to achieve these ends, including under the cover of extradition treaties and Interpol’s red notice system, which allows them to extract their nationals even from democratic states. Activists forced to flee their countries due to persecution risk being returned under international rules that are supposed to be used against the perpetrators of serious crimes. Repressive states need only brand dissidents as terrorists or accuse them of money laundering – something they routinely do.

Host states that are themselves repressive often offer the collaboration of their intelligence and security forces.

Responses needed

Against attempts to infiltrate them, exiled activists and organisations form tight support networks and equip themselves against threats. They adopt digital security measures and self-protection strategies. They report violations when the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council examines their countries’ human rights records.

But they need help. As transnational repression intensifies, activists around the world are sounding the alarm. They’re pushing for states to make multilateral efforts to establish international norms to counter the trend, starting with the establishment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Transnational Repression.

Exiled activists need a lot more support than they’re getting from host governments and the broader international community. Democratic states should issue credible warnings against state agents operating illegally on foreign soil. They should demonstrate greater respect for the right to seek asylum, provide enhanced protections for activists at risk and take a more nuanced approach to extradition requests and Interpol notices issued by states known to engage in transnational repression. They must become the safe haven persecuted activists need.